Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 14 January

Los Angeles Plays Itself (Anderson, 2003)

I first recom­men­ded this film here back in September 2023 but recent events in Pacific Palisades, Malibu, Altadena and the rest have brought it back to me.

It’s a psy­cho­geo­graph­ic his­tory of Hollywood and Los Angeles in two parts. The first is about how Los Angeles has been used to play oth­er places in the movies (often to hil­ari­ous effect) and the second is about how the city itself has been por­trayed in cinema.

There are some eye-opening sequences about icon­ic build­ings like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House – most fam­ous per­haps as a loc­a­tion for Blade Runner but in fact used dozens of times.

This sec­tion is some­times very funny, helped by Encke King’s sar­don­ic nar­ra­tion of film­maker Thom Anderson’s script. It’s as if Philip Marlowe him­self is invest­ig­at­ing the his­tory of Hollywood, stum­bling across loose ends everywhere.

But then Part Two – I think there was even an inter­val at the fest­iv­al screen­ing – takes a deep dive into cine­mat­ic por­tray­als of the city itself and wheth­er Los Angelenos can even recog­nise them­selves and their city in those portrayals.

From European imports like Jacques Demy try­ing to under­stand ali­en California cul­ture in the 1960s (Model Shop) to Who Framed Roger Rabbit’s rewrit­ing of LA pub­lic trans­port his­tory and on to Michael Mann’s ali­en­at­ing down­town in Heat, a shiny down­town that had been con­struc­ted on the ruins of dis­placed work­ing class lives.

Why is mod­ern California archi­tec­ture always occu­pied by the vil­lains? Why do cops in LA always seem to live beside work­ing oil derricks?

Watching Den of Thieves the oth­er night and learn­ing that most of the sup­posedly LA loc­a­tions were actu­ally Atlanta also made me feel for the way the real Los Angeles has had the dirty done on it over and over again by the movies.

I’ve lif­ted the pay­wall on the ori­gin­al post so every­one can read it.

Where to watch Los Angeles Plays Itself

Worldwide: Streaming on YouTube* or on Blu-ray phys­ic­al media

Aotearoa: Not cur­rently available

Australia: Not cur­rently available

Canada: Digital rent­al from Apple

Ireland: Not cur­rently available

India: Not cur­rently available

USA: Streaming on Kanopy or digit­al rental

UK: Not cur­rently available

* I’m pretty sure that this YouTube upload is not legit – Persian sub­titles and a not-great aspect ratio? – but if the rights hold­er has left it up this long, maybe we turn a blind eye to pir­acy for a change: